Toward Sustainable Adoption of Integrated Care for Prevention of Unplanned Hospitalizations: A Qualitative Analysis

Complex chronic patients are prone to unplanned hospitalizations leading to a high burden on healthcare systems. To date, interventions to prevent unplanned admissions show inconclusive results. We report a qualitative analysis performed into the EU initiative JADECARE (2020-2023) to design a digitally enabled integrated care program aiming at preventing unplanned hospitalizations. A two-phase process with four design thinking (DT) sessions was conducted to analyse the management of complex chronic patients in the region of Catalonia (ES). In Phase I, Discovery, two DT sessions, October 2021 and February 2022, were done using as background information: i) the results of twenty structured interviews (five patients and fifteen professionals), ii) two governmental documents on regional deployment of integrated care and on the Catalan digital health strategy, respectively, and iii) the results of a cluster analysis of 761 hospitalizations. In Phase II, Confirmation, we examined the 30- and 90-day post-discharge periods of 49,604 hospitalizations as input for two additional DT sessions conducted in November and December 2022. The qualitative analysis identified poor personalization of the interventions, the need for organizational changes, immature digitalization, and suboptimal services evaluation as main explanatory factors of the observed efficacy-effectiveness gap. Additionally, a program for prevention of unplanned hospitalizations, to be evaluated during the period 2024-2025, was generated. A digitally enabled adaptive case management approach to foster collaborative work and personalization of care, as well as organizational re-engineering, are endorsed for value-based prevention of unplanned hospitalizations.